Douglas Carswell's Blog

Whitehall, not Labour, is the biggest threat to the public service reform agenda

David Cameron today announces plans to give people a legal right to choose what public services they get. He promises to end “the closed state monopoly where central government decides what you get, and how you get it.”

Excellent.  This sends me off on the Easter recess with a spring in my step.   

Long after the media has moved on from talking about pasties, this public reform agenda offers the chance to transform the lives of millions of people for the better.

Today, the average working Brit hands over to government more than £6 in taxes out of every £10 that they earn. Unlike most of the other purchases that we make, at the moment we have very little say over how government spends all the money we give it, or what they buy on our behalf.  Without consumer power, too often my constituents discover that they are expected to simply stand in line and wait.

Folk might have been prepared to tolerate stand-in-line-and-wait public services a generation ago, but increasingly we live in a society where people expect to be able to chose things for themselves. If you can set your own specifications when buying the little things in life – music, apps, gym membership - what about having more choice over the big things, like your family’s health care or education? 

The brighter sort of lefties understand that stand-in-line-and-wait will no longer do. Whatever Ed Miliband’s tactical posturing as leader of the opposition, to be fair the Blairites can point to the faltering, tentative steps that were made in the right direction made during the dying days of Tony Blair’s premiership. 

The real question is not the attitude of Labour, but the attitude of the permanent civil service in Whitehall, for who most things are best left to experts. They have consistently watered down this administration’s boldest, most Hiltonian attempts at reform (bonfire of the quangos, anyone?)

There is a danger that giving people a legal right to a minimum standard of service turns out to be little more than John Major’s Citizens’ Charter with a few wobbly teeth - unless it includes a right for dissatisfied punters to opt out altogether.  

Far more important than defining minimum standards of service, or enshrining the complaints process in law, is giving the punter the right to take their money elsewhere.  It is that, rather than a set of legally enforcable rights, which gives consumers power. 

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